For our annual gift guide,
TheAtlantic.com asked
contributors and assorted luminaries to tell us what's high on
their holiday wish list -- and what charity they'd like their
friends to support.

What's on their wish lists?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton, former director of policy planning for the State Department and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School On her list: A massage chair

Procrastinating at the beginning of every flight, promising myself that I will get down to real work once we're in the air, I leaf through Skymall (itself a stroke of advertising genius for captive consumers wealthy enough to fly). I pause every time and dream about owning the Sogno Dream Wave, advertised as the world's best massage chair. I dream about sinking into it and feeling the permanent knots in my shoulders disappear--the knots a massage therapist once called my "muscles of responsibility." Any working mother will relate, as will millions of others in our overstressed and under-supported American world.

But I am enormously privileged compared to most of my fellow citizens: to begin with, I have a house that I could put my dream Christmas gift in. Thus my charity is The Bridge Fund of Massachusetts, an organization that does the vital work of providing loans to people on the edge of losing their houses.